Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) candidate for the December 2012 presidential election, recently delivered a speech at the 3rd International Conference of the NPP, in Hamburg, Germany (on Saturday, June 11, 2011).
Shortly after that speech, the NPP's communications team, issued a press release with the following headline: "Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo: "NDC has made Ghana a poverty–owing democracy".
It is extraordinary how so many of the members of our political class, are taking Ghanaian democracy for granted.
If that were not the case, why would a highly intelligent and decent gentleman like Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, someone who may even become a president of the Republic of Ghana, one day, and who although fully aware Ghanaians are not the only people on the surface of the planet Earth experiencing a drop in their living standards, still go ahead and mock the National Democratic Congress (NDC) regime of President Mills, in faraway Germany - lashing out at the government for the difficulties ordinary Ghanaians are experiencing: even as the Mills administration deals with the economic mess his own NPP regime left behind?
I am sure that even the good-natured and God-fearing President Mills, must find that kind of disingenuousness, particularly galling and intolerable - especially when whiles his regime cleans up the NPP's economic mess, it is also doing all it can, at the same time, to induce some growth in the economy: a task, incidentally, which some might say is a mission-impossible, but which, surprisingly, the NDC government is actually succeeding in doing.
Yet, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is actually aware of the fact that the problems Ghanaians face today, result from the irresponsible and reckless management of the Ghanaian economy, by his own party, during the later stages of the tenure of the profligate, dishonest and corrupt President Kufuor (who, incidentally, is welcome to sue me in the law courts, for saying the truth about him - at which point, he will realise that his bosom friend Abdul Malik Kweku Baako, is not the only journalist in Ghana, who has super-sensitive documents in his possession!).
Well-educated Ghanaian politicians like Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, are cognisant of the fact that, as we speak, there has been, and there continues to be, a drop in even the standards of living of millions of Britons, including middle class Brits; Irish citizens; Spaniards; Portuguese; Greeks and that of millions of American families, many of them middle class - all as a result of the economic difficulties faced by their nations: one of the most pressing of which is the battle to eliminate deficits and re-balance public finances.
So, why are intelligent and good human beings like Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, making light of the dire straights ordinary Ghanaians and their nation face today, because, out of necessity, cuts have to be made in public spending - in order to eliminate the deficit his reckless regime left behind, in the first place?
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo also mentioned attacks on the judiciary. What could be worse for any self-respecting democracy, than top lawyers (NPP members to a man!), working hand-in-glove with the nation's Chief Justice, to ambush Ghanaian democracy - by attempting to manipulate the legal system to overturn the verdict of a nation totally fed up with their arrogant, incompetent, tribal-supremacist and largely-corrupt NPP regime?
Was it not his own hypocritical cousin, the loquacious and smug Atta Akyea, and his bosom friend, the inscrutable Malik Yakubu Alhassan, who revealed that there were judges in the system, "right judges" was how they actually described those judges, apparently ever-willing to prostitute the honour of the judiciary, to help their favourite political party, the NPP, whenever the need arose?
What could be more dangerous and damaging to a genuine democracy than partisan judges, I ask?
Why does he think that now virtually no judge wants to touch the case in which some Ghanaians are seeking to reverse that outrage in which by the stroke of a pen, the NPP regime of President Kufuor, created an enlarged GT Group, a veritable fraud no different from the so-called International Aluminium Partners (IAP), and sold it for a song to Vodafone - in clear contravention of Section 2 of the Divestiture of State Interest Act (DSI)?
For those with short memories, IAP, was the special purpose vehicle created to enable NPP big-wigs use foreigners as a legal front, to asset-strip VALCO successfully.
The present Minority Leader in Parliament, the self-righteous Hon. Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, was tasked by our former crook-in-chief, to railroad the sale and purchase agreement for VALCO to that fraudulent IAP through Parliament.
Naturally, he, of course, has developed a severe case of selective amnesia about that fraud, today. Readers will recall that both Norske Hydro and VALE (supposedly in a joint-venture partnership as IAP, when in actual fact, no such legal partnership existed!), denied ever agreeing to purchase VALCO. Extraordinary - but that was vintage Kufuor & Co for you! But again, I digress.
Things are getting more and more interesting in Ghanaian politics. Doubtless, we will definitely see where the extraordinary decision by the Judges and Magistrates Association, to boycott the four lawyers who said there was corruption in the judiciary, will lead to, and end.
Those too-clever-by-half individuals who were hiding behind that body to get the four lawyers debarred, have opened Pandora's box - and we all await the denouement of this unedifying saga.
My little two-pesewa contribution to the victimised four lawyers, is: they would do well to look up the Indian online anti-corruption website "ipaidabribe.com" - and quickly replicate it here for fighting corruption in the judiciary and elsewhere in Ghana's public sector: whose upper echelons are currently jam-packed with sympathisers of the NPP - not one of them wanting President Mills to succeed.
Those who wanted to victimise the four lawyers by proxy, have, alas, bitten on more than they can chew - and society will now make sure that Ghana indeed does have a judiciary, which is free of individuals who are unfit to be judges and magistrates, to sit in judgment over their cases before law courts in Ghana.
Ghana has always been a trailblazer in sub-Saharan Africa. If the members of our political class don't get serious, and work hard to enable ordinary people enjoy their share of the "democracy dividend," they may eventually face an angry public, totally fed up with the inability of their leaders to transform Ghanaian society into an African equivalent of the egalitarian societies of Scandinavia.
They will then be swept away by the same tide of anger and frustration, which suddenly brought to an abrupt end, the seemingly stable regimes of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the former Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali'.
The signs are there for all to see: the huge disparities in wealth between the masses and the politically well-connected, who are prospering mightily as a result of political patronage, not because they are innovative businesspeople leveraging their own cutting-edge ideas; a section of the judiciary that is clearly partisan, biased and abusing their unique balancing role under our constitution; greedy politicians out of touch with ordinary people and unable to improve the quality of life of ordinary Ghanaians, which is deteriorating in inverse proportion to the dizzying speed with which the personal net worth of the well-connected ascends to stratospheric heights, and a mostly-incompetent and fractious political class, whose main concerns are winning power and exploiting the national economy for private gain for themselves, their family clans and their cronies - at public expense.
It is no exaggeration to say that beneath the patina of a stable and viable democratic nation-state, in reality, Ghana sits atop a powder keg (of mounting frustration amongst ordinary people, who are fed up with, amongst their many woes, irregular supplies of treated water and electric power), which is waiting to explode.
Our political parties must get serious - and deal with the problems of ordinary people: before ordinary folk start dealing with them, for letting them down badly.
At this juncture, dear reader, one would crave one's readers' indulgence a little - in order to make a few observations about the NPP and its communications team: before dealing with some of the very important issues that Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo's Hamburg speech raise.
(Contentious issues, such as: the sincerity, or lack of it, of members of our political class; the unnecessary and unhelpful raising of expectations by political parties, amongst ordinary people, merely in order to enable them win elections; and the attempts at compromising the independence of judges, as well as the unhelpful mudslinging aimed at the judiciary by politicians.)
That hard-working and resourceful NPP communications team, is led by the ever-so-smooth Nana Akomea, a former information minister, in the NPP regime of President Kufuor. The team's work rate, is truly phenomenal indeed - and very impressive.
Naturally, one presumes that that NPP communications team, unofficially includes its many truth-bending allies in the Ghanaian media - such as the Searchlight, the various versions of the Statesman and the Daily Guide.
And if assidousness in the dark arts of "toli-propaganda" could win elections, the NPP would romp home with a landslide victory, in the December 2012 elections. They are that good - in the art and science of dissimulation, that is.
Such is the depth of their expertise in that esoteric field of human knowledge, that it once led an exasperated Ghanaian wag to quip: "Their habitual twisting of facts and figures, will definitely bar them from heaven, if there is one. But it may eventually open the gates to heaven-on-earth: the Osu Castle, Ghana's seat of government, to them."
The Osu Castle, as we all know, is a sacred patch of ancestral African ground, on which all those who stand; sit; kneel; squat or lie prostrate, are instantly blessed by the gods - who make sure that the African sun shines on them.
When it is returned to power again, the Osu Castle's gates will be opened to the NPP's grasping-hordes: the over 100,000 constituency executives, who constitute that party's electoral college for selecting their presidential candidates.
To the aforementioned wag, the prospect of the power, which that multitude of self-seekers extraordinary, will wield in any future NPP regime, is a terrifying thought.
He believes that they will end up holding future NPP presidents of the Republic of Ghana, to ransom - and that they have the potential to make President Mills' little local difficulties with the National Democratic Congress' foot soldiers, look like mere child's play, in comparison.
Of course, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, being a clever gentleman, has already signalled to them (and other potential NPP troublemakers) that there will be golden sinecures galore - so they need never rock the NPP golden boat of plenty, the MV Akan Adehye Akuw 11, should their party return to power again.
That selfsame wag and cynic, drew my attention to the possibility of corruption on a scale seldom seen in Ghana's history, if a party with so many swollen-headed and mostly-unprincipled kingmakers to whom a Ghanaian president owed his position, came to power in Ghana.
He then went on to add: "Massa, it will make that greedy Kufuor & Co lot look like saints - and there will be one corruption scandal after another throughout the tenure of that president."
It is a real mystery to me why the finance and economic planning ministerial team, seldom responds directly to the perfidy of the NPP, on economic issues - but invariably choose instead, to remain silent and aloof.
Why do they not take a leaf from the book of their British counterpart, Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne - who never ceases to defend his policies and counters criticisms from all quarters - especially those of Ed Balls, the Labour Party's shadow chancellor?
Their strange silence, is almost as if the ministry of information were an adjunct of their ministry. The question is, how good, for example, is the information ministry's ministerial team's grasp of the subject of economics? Are they even financially literate - let alone conversant with the financial services sector, at all: and all matters financial?
Why must the burden of having to fight to defeat the NPP masters of the dark arts of manipulation of facts and figures on economic issues (for political gain!), rest on the unsteady and slender shoulders of the information ministry's ministerial team, who may have very little expertise, if any, on the subject of economics, I ask? Incredible. But I digress.
Perhaps the question that many of the witty and apolitical cynics in our midst, who learnt about Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's Hamburg diatribe against the Mills administration, would pose, in Nigerian pidgin English, after listening to a tape-recording of that Hamburg speech, would be: "So, na who cause am, Oga?"
The plain truth, is that Ghanaians are impoverished today, not because of anything done or left undone by the NDC regime of President Mills - but as a direct result of the economic mess left behind by the government of the selfsame NPP of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's.
And every honest and God-fearing NPP member with even a rudimentary understanding of economics, knows in his or her heart, that that indeed is the case.
Incidentally, those Hamburg words of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's, however, must have been music to the ears of the fatcats amongst the NPP's membership in the diaspora - who grew super-rich using a plethora of special purpose offshore vehicles, riping Mother Ghana off - during the golden age of business for Kufuor & Co.
For yet another type of Ghanaian, the discerning, independent-minded and patriotic kind, the choice of the German port city of Hamburg for that 3rd NPP International Conference, would have reminded them of Radio Gold FM's "Election Forensics" programme.
Who can forget the broadcast of the tape-recording of that chilling conversation, between the Mother-of-all-liars, that ghastly Ghanaian woman resident in Germany, whom the host of the programme, Raymond Archer, so aptly nicknamed Jezebel, for her ruthless and amoral nature?
Clearly one of those favoured individuals who lost out when the NPP was turfed out of power, in the December 2008 elections, she was obviously a major beneficiary of President Kufuor's pork-barrel kokofu-football-politricks.
Like our former hypocrite-in-chief, Kufuor, himself, that dreadful "bottom-power" woman, came across as a manipulative and not-so-honest individual - prepared to cook up a vile story to plunge Ghana into chaos, if it would enable the NPP hold on to power, in the immediate aftermath of the run-off of the December 2008 presidential election.
Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's words that day, must have been music to her unprincipled ears - as well as to those hungry-for-awoof-cash NPP supporters, waiting in the shadows, for their party to return to power again.
The hope of that greedy and super-ruthless lot, is that once the NPP returns to power, they can start to "chop Ghana small" again - to use a phrase-of-infamy coined by a super-ruthless Lebanese businessman, who made a career and a fortune, out of riping our homeland Ghana off for years.
The sad thing about the super-clever folk who make up the NPP's communications team, led by the highly-intelligent and erudite Nana Akomea, is that like Franklin Cudjoe of the neo-liberal Ghanaian think-tank IMANI, he is perfectly aware that (to paraphrase IMANI's Franklin Cudjoe) as a proportion of GDP, the deficit left by the NPP government, was much bigger than that of Greece.
And we all know the woes Greeks are going through, as their hapless government struggles to reduce its deficit, do we not, dear reader? Is that troubled EU member state's problems not threatening to precipitate yet another major financial crisis - and the very future of the euro?
And is there not violence and chaos galore across Greece, as we speak, as its hard-up citizens complain about the hopelessness of their individual circumstances? Hmmm, Ghana - eyeasem oo!
Nana Akomea and his ilk, are doing such great disservice to Ghanaian democracy, by refusing to make ordinary Ghanaians aware of, and understand, the harsh implications for citizens of nations seeking to cut their deficits and re-balance public finances.
More so when it was the NPP's irresponsible and reckless spending when in power, which resulted in that deficit, in the first place.
From Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo down to the last NPP constituency ward leader, they all know that citizens of nations such as the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece, are all poorer today, as a result of the massive spending cuts being made by their governments, to help bring their deficits down.
Indeed, right across those nations, many have seen their incomes cut and their living standards plummet - as unemployment, personal debt and inflation impoverishes millions in the West.
Members of Ghana's political class must not take our nation's democracy for granted. They must tell Ghanaians the truth about Ghana's economic situation - and stop the irresponsible point-scoring and unnecessary raising of expectations.
The time has come for them to spell out the grim realities clearly to ordinary people, about the difficulties that confront our nation - and the fact that things will, of necessity, have to get worse, before they can ever get better: as the private sector begins to be empowered to take up the slack created by spending cuts to help bring the deficit down.
There is no other known way to create long-term prosperity, other than ensuring that the state will not crowd out the private sector from the capital markets through over-borrowing.
When public finances are robust, governments can afford to lower the tax burden on individuals and businesses - both necessary to help create a virtuous economic cycle.
Politicians must not persist in painting a false picture to a nation that needs to understand clearly that structural imbalances can be dealt with effectively, only in conjunction with prolonged individual sacrifice on the part of all Ghanaians, and accompanied by drastic and painful cuts in public spending.
They must not continue to pretend that they have magic-wand solutions to Ghana's myriad of problems, when it is only hard work, a skilled workforce with high productivity levels and a Ghanaian business world full of dynamic entrepreneurs, with innovative ideas and a firm belief in corporate good governance principles, which will make Ghana prosperous.
If they persist with the vote-us-in-and-we-will-change-your-fortunes-when-in-power lark, which really is a mug's game, in the end, the masses will cotton on to their perfidy, become disillusioned with Ghanaian democracy - and simply rebel: just like the Egyptians and Tunisians did.
The raising of public expectations unnecessarily, followed by the disappointment felt by ordinary people when those expectations are not met, when political parties come to power, has dangerous consequences.
Ghanaian politicians must not be surprised if our own version of the Arab-street people power revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, occurs here too. They must get real - or the people will sooner or later come and get them from their Hollywood-style palatial mansions: in those posh gated-communities they are now so enamoured of.
Tel (powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana, that actually works!): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109.
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